Editing River Cam (section)

==Literature==
"[[The Reeve's Tale]]" from [[Geoffrey Chaucer]]'s ''[[The Canterbury Tales|Canterbury Tales]]'' begins:

{{poemquote
|text=:At Trumpyngtoun, nat fer fro Cantebrigge,
:Ther gooth a brook, and over that a brigge,
:Upon the whiche brook ther stant a melle;
:And this is verray sooth that I yow telle:
:A millere was ther dwellynge many a day.
}}

The mill formerly stood by Brasley Bridge on Grantchester Road. The mill pond is extant and the foundations of the mill can be seen when the water is low.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.trumpingtonlocalhistorygroup.org/subjects_reminiscences_Dring3.html|author=W. E. Dring|title=Grantchester Road, Byron's Pool and the River Cam|year=1974|publisher=Trumpington Local History Group|access-date=29 September 2010|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100130201647/http://www.trumpingtonlocalhistorygroup.org/subjects_reminiscences_Dring3.html|archive-date=30 January 2010|df=dmy-all}}</ref>

Byron's Pool is named after the poet, [[Lord Byron]], who is reputed to have swum there. It was certainly a bathing place for [[Rupert Brooke]] and the Cambridge [[neo-Pagan (literature)|neo-Pagan]]s. Brooke used to canoe from Cambridge to lodgings in Grantchester, which included the [[Old Vicarage, Grantchester|Old Vicarage]]. His homesick poem of 1912 evokes the river:

: Oh! there the chestnuts, summer through,
: Beside the river make for you
: A tunnel of green gloom, and sleep
: Deeply above; and green and deep
: The stream mysterious glides beneath,
: Green as a dream and deep as death.
: ...
: To smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten
: Unforgettable, unforgotten
: River-smell, and hear the breeze
: Sobbing in the little trees.
: Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand
: Still guardians of that holy land?
: The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream,
: The yet unacademic stream?
—"[[The Old Vicarage, Grantchester]]", ''Collected Poems'' (1916)<ref>{{gutenberg|no=262|name=The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke}}</ref>

One of Brooke's contemporaries, [[Gwen Raverat|Gwen Darwin]], later Raverat, grew up in the old mill by the Mill Pond. Her book, ''[[Period Piece (book)|Period Piece]]'', is a memoir of a childhood messing about on the river. The mill house is now part of [[Darwin College, Cambridge|Darwin College]].
{{Wide image|Darwin college.jpg|1000px|Darwin College seen across the Mill Pond}}
Children's author [[Philippa Pearce]], who lived in Great Shelford until her death in December 2006, featured the Cam in her books, most notably ''[[Minnow on the Say (novel)|Minnow on the Say]]''. The river is renamed the River Say, with Great and Little Shelford becoming Great and Little Barley, and Cambridge becoming "Castleford" (not to be confused with the real town of the same name in West Yorkshire).

River Cam is referred to as "Camus, reverend Sire" in line 103 of [[John Milton]]'s [[pastoral]] [[elegy]] ''[[Lycidas]]''. [[Edward King (British poet)|Edward King]], in whose memory the elegy was composed, was a fellow student at Cambridge.